Harper’s is pleased to present The whole time, the sun, Montreal-based artist Joani Tremblay’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will feature a selection of new paintings by Tremblay, created throughout the Montreal winter. Harper’s Chelsea is open to the public from 10am to 6pm Tuesday through Saturday.

Joani Tremblay mines virtual, physical, utopian, remembered, and real places to create composited landscape and skyscape paintings in oil. In these works, idyllic expanses are framed by fragments of domestic and built environments such as thresholds and plants. Sun-soaked and imbued with the transcendentalist spirit and tenor of the American modernists of the Southwest, their work oscillates between representation and abstraction. Tremblay’s worlds activate an illusory median where perception and schemata are distilled to form new psychological oases.

The whole time, the sun is the title of a poem by Sarah Burgoyne, itself borrowed from a translation of Albert Camus’ The Stranger; each subsequent stanza is channeled from Camus and Sara Ahmed, a leading postcolonial feminist theorist. By means of refraction and recontextualization, the framework of the exhibition suggests a recursive reorientation and existential incantation. Grounded in the words of their peers and forbears, Tremblay affirms their conceptual genealogy, finding oxygen by untangling and reweaving sticky notions of place in relation to the social. Invoking Camus via Burgoyne: “The day, already bright with sun, hit me like a slap in the face.”

Please join Harper’s on Friday, April 16th at 2 pm EST on Instagram Live for a virtual poetry reading by Sarah Burgoyne, followed by an exhibition walk-through and Q&A with Tremblay. Follow @harpersbooks on Instagram for updates.